Dr. Beth Furth is one of my favorite professors I’ve met during my first year of medical school. She’s a gastrointestinal pathologist who knows how to party: at the end of one of her last lectures, some of the students turned on Iggy Azalea’s “I’m So Fancy” and asked her to dance with us. She agreed, but requested Pharrell’s “Happy” and proceeded to show us some groovy moves. I appreciate her approach to teaching, which is to understand the mechanisms and first principles of a particular issue, then apply that understanding to solve more complex problems. In between her wacky jokes, she’s shared with her students a bit of her life philosophy, which involves a constant thirst for knowledge and the importance of PLAY. Dr. Furth agreed to chat with Megan and me one afternoon and tell us more about her life, her passions, and her philosophy. After meeting her outside her office, we head down to the courtyard outside the hospital and sit on some red wire chairs. Because we’re dying to know the answer, we jump right into the deepest question:

What is your life philosophy?

“Well, it’s actually pretty simple. I’ve thought a lot about this; I’m a very reflective human being. So my philosophy of life is to try to be fulfilled. The next question is how do you try to be fulfilled and ‘happy’? The best book that rings true to me that I’ve read about this is Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. I’ve read that book many, many times. It’s very profound. What he says, to summarize his philosophy which rings true for me, is the thing that makes me feel fulfilled is to do for others. So if I can do for others, that’s what I feel most happy about. So my philosophy is a servant lifeship, so to speak. If I can serve others in a meaningful way, then I think I’ve done something that justifies my existence. So that’s what I try to do.”

A picture Beth took of tree bark. She says, "To me, the picture of the bark shows how beauty exists all around us. We just need to learn how to 'see' with the 'proper' perspective."

“Everybody has the opportunity to serve people in different ways. Some of them are very simple, and it may sound trite, but if I see a piece of trash on the floor, I try to pick it up, because it’s the right thing to do, and frankly, in the hospital, I don’t want somebody to slip on it. It’s mind boggling for me to see people walk by it [the trash] and not pick it up. Or just even the most simple things, like when you come into a room, to the administrative assistants or the people picking up your trash, just say, ‘Hi, how are ya? What’s your name?’ To acknowledge people as people is a way to serve others, to acknowledge that we’re all in this together. To acknowledge the humanism in every body is what I try to do.” Another key component to her life philosophy:

“One of the central pieces to my philosophy is play. Play. PLAY! Just relax, have fun, just be able to have fun!”

One of the central pieces to my philosophy is play. Play. PLAY!"

Hand in hand with her need for play is her thirst for knowledge. “I’m a drug addict. I crave the ‘Aha!’ moment. I am hooked. I just want to know how things work. Everything. And Anything. Everything and anything! I am constantly amazed at everything. When I drive (I’m ADHD) I gotta pay attention to the road because I’m like looking at the buildings thinking, ‘Oh, that is such cool architecture! That is such an interesting idea.’ And I just observe it and think, ‘Oh my god, that’s beautiful.’

And I just observe it and think, 'Oh my god, that's beautiful.'"

I ask, “With your nature of being so intrigued by everything and always wanting to know more and more and more, how did you ever settle on one career? How do you choose when you’re so interested in so many things?”

A 6 cm tall Victorian house Beth designed and built for her n gauge train village

“Because it’s all smoke and mirrors”, she answers. “I actually have many careers. I get to be a teacher, I get to be a scientist, I get to be a doctor. I get to be in a leadership/director/administrative position. I go home and I get to restore and build furniture. I get to do my gardening. I grow vegetables. I love to cook, I love to eat. I love to do athletics. I rowed competitively in college, I row competitively on the Schuylkill, I go mountain biking. I love photography too. Visual arts, working with my hands. This past year I have gotten into n gauge model railroads. So I built my own little village and I’m figuring all that out now. That’s why I’m so into architecture recently. [The village is] Victorian style, so when I see a building I think, ‘So how could I build that in miniature?’ So you see, I haven’t really settled on

anything yet.” She explains how this thirst for knowledge has influenced her teaching: “The way I try to teach to fuel my addictive ‘Aha’ moments is that I teach from first mechanisms. Given A and B, we can get C, and how do we do that? If I can distill that down from these very complex biological systems and create some kind of reductionist formula that I can then help show people, ‘See what I found’ and they get it – to me that it is one of the biggest jolts I can get it. It’s like, ‘Oh my god, isn’t that cool stuff? Isn’t this fun!?’” Dr. Furth’s mother is a physician and her father was a mathematician so she says she was “hardwired in utero” to approach problems with an analytical eye. Her passion and curiosity eventually led her to MIT. She describes her undergraduate experience there: “In a class of 1000, we were 90 women, but I chose it because it was like, ‘This is the place for me! It fits. Yes! We will understand things, people. We will go from first principles. All of my tests basically were open-book – they didn’t care what you memorized -- that was absurd. It was, ‘Can you take a problem and solve it?’ To me, that seems like this life…. All one open-book exam.”

The transition between undergraduate and medical school was difficult for her. “When I was interviewing for medical school, it was quite the mind-deafening experience for me. My mother is a physician and my father was a mathematician and engineer, so I grew up thinking those fields were the same. I did lots of research in undergrad and I go to interview for medical school and I talk about mechanisms and research and how things work. And this one interviewer, this doctor, looked at me. He leans in and he goes, ‘Well it sounds like you are more interested in molecules than people.’” (Megan and I, ‘Ooooo, nooo!’) “I sat back and paused for about 5 seconds. I looked at him and I said, very confidently, ‘People are made of molecules’. The interview ended and I was accepted to that medical school. I chose not to go…. to that one.”

People are made of molecules."

I ask her what her experience in medical school was like, and she tells me: “I hated it. Well, I loved the pathophysiology course because it was truly integrated. It was what I thought medicine should be. It was mechanisms of disease. You look at stuff, figure out what it is and how it works. I hated anatomy because it was memorization. My neuronal circuitry is not wired for that. I wish it were, but it’s not. I sat there thinking, ‘What did I do? I made the wrong choice. This is crazy’. I got through it. And then I got to the wards --- and it was like, ‘Oh my god’ [disappointed ‘oh my god’, not excited ‘oh my god’]. I understand that you don’t want to sit around and philosophize as you’re trying to take care of somebody, but when you do have the time and you’re asking your attending, ‘Gee, why does that happen?’ and you’re given the cold shoulder, you kinda get a little pissed… You can put this on paper. Let me just tell you – our medical school education as it stands right now, a lot of it, I am appalled. I am simply appalled. The lack of fundamental mechanisms and the import of that is to me sad.” So how do you approach things differently now that you’re the person educating the next generation? “I took those negative experiences [from medical school and residency] and said, ‘I’m not doing that. [Now] I direct the fellowship and do a lot of teaching in the hospital. I’m a very Socratic teacher – ‘let’s look at this, let’s talk about it and work it through together’, as opposed to spewing out tons of information, which is ridiculous. And I like to get people excited about things, which is easy because everything is so interesting.”

I like to get people excited about things, which is easy because everything is so interesting."

Being observant and using quantitative methods is what helped her career take off. “I got promoted pretty quickly here,” she tells us. “But I made my career out of the obvious. I’m like, ‘How can you not see this thing? It’s like, hello!’ People just stepped over it like the trash on the floor. So I feel kind of like a fraud, and I know that whole syndrome [Impostor Syndrome] but it was so obvious.” I ask her what her discovery was and she replies: “A lot of things! People just assumed. Let’s not assume. Let’s actually test it.” Megan asks Dr. Furth if she remembers her first discovery. She tells us that it was during her undergraduate career, and she jokes that it’s her most famous discovery to this day. “It was seriously one of the ‘Aha’ moments that I love, truly lightning in your head moments. I was trying to develop this assay using this microwell system to put cells in with a selective agent. It wasn’t clear how we were going to translate signal in terms of growth in these wells to an actual fraction. So when I was running doing a bridge circuit (I rowed competitively in college), I was talking about this with my friend who was running with me. And I can remember to this day, we were on the Boston side of the run. I just stopped and I said, ‘Wait a second, I’ve got it. You just have to use a proper dilution and then we can just use Poisson distribution and figure it out.’ I told my PI in my lab and he was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s brilliant!’ And so we did that, and that was probably the pinnacle of my career because that’s the most cited paper I have. And it’s like, great, it’s all downhill from there.”

Let's not assume. Let's actually test it."

The question she’s currently mulling over in her head is how she can apply topology, specifically the concept of a fractal dimension, to her field of pathology and to better predict how many biopsies need to be taken to make a definitive diagnosis. She explains to us what she means by clustering our phones on the table. She describes how the phones can either be homogeneously or inhomogeneously distributed on the table.

“If you were to look at the density [of phones] as a function of geography and then plot that out, for the table for which it was homogeneously distributed, it would be flat. For something with clustering, it would go up and down. Fractal dimension is a measure that will tell you how jagged something is or isn’t. How smooth or, what I want to call ‘furry’ something is would be one metric, I think, that you could use to describe those two tables. And then you could start to look from a probabilistic standpoint, assuming your bites are random, how many bites you need to find the fractal dimension of that table. It has an application. People go and take biopsies of the [gastrointestinal] mucosa and they’re trying to diagnose something that is dependent on the number

A rust impression Beth made from a tin ceiling tile she found at a salvage store. She took a cotton cloth rag and soaked it in vinegar and pressed it against the tile to make this beautiful pattern .

or density of the cell population. Don’t you want to know what the distribution is before you start talking about numbers [of cells needed to make the diagnosis]? No one ever thought about doing that, to which I say, bullshit! It’s like, oh come on people. Really? Really? These numbers that are published …'you need so many eosinophils per view to call it this..’ It’s bullshit. It’s complete bullshit. So one of my philosophies or goals in life is to eradicate bullshit. Or at least to merely to expose the bullshit. And if I could pick it up like the garbage on the floor in the hospital, I am more than happy to do so. But at minimum, may I at least expose it and put up a warning sign.”

One of my goals in life is to eradicate bullshit."

We ask her what makes her life full (in addition to eradicating bullshit). She says: “There’s play, there’s relationships. I have a wonderful relationship with my partner. I have two wonderful children, one of whom is a medical student. That to me is another huge part of what makes my life. I serve my children and I think that they are great members of society, so in that way I am secondarily serving others.” Always looking for inspiration for places to travel, Megan asks about her favorite place she’s ever visited. But for Dr. Furth, that place is much closer than we expected. “My favorite place to travel not for work is in my home -- my backyard and Wissahickon park right down the block. That to me is absolute heaven.” She explains that, “We bought a home that was built in 1920. We are doing a lot of rehab to bring it back to its full glorious previous life. It’s a great house in a great neighborhood. I planted a vegetable garden, stuff like that. I get to refinish furniture. We redid our kitchen and it is such a glorious space that every time I walk in just can’t believe how glorious it is. I’ve been doing a lot stripping and painting of baseboards.”

Beth's n scale model work station

In fact, Dr. Furth would like to spend more time on home renovations and furniture building. When we ask her what her next project is, she tells us, “That’s a great question, something I’ve been thinking of a lot. In terms of nonprofessional, I know how to build some furniture, but I want to learn more. If I could spend all of my time as an apprentice, I would do that in a heartbeat and just be a woodworker and learn how to build furniture and have a hobby farm.” Finally, we want to know what superpower this already extraordinary doctor and teacher would like. “Oh, that is such an amazing question. [Pause] I’m usually not speechless. I would like time travelling. But not to time travel to the future; I don’t want that.

I’d want to travel back in time because I think history is so fun. I’d like to go back in time and see what this place was like. I think it would be just so friggin’ cool. I’m just so friggin curious.” And that truly sums it up: she’s just so curious.